Former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw discusses the lasting lessons from covering the Watergate scandal as a young White House correspondent and his views on how the modern news media covers politics in America.
On covering Watergate: [President Nixon] was playing the part of a president who had been wronged by his staff, but there were all kinds of indications that he knew a hell of a lot about what was going on and we had to keep piecing that together.”
On the political lessons of Watergate: “There was this kind of onset that comes with people who think that they’ve got this big job…. It’s the hardest thing in Washington, and it’s not confined to the Republican Party…. Hubris is the greatest enemy of efficiency in Washington in my judgment…people get to believe that they can do whatever they want to do.”
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